I made this tart a while ago – to take pictures to paint from – but it was tasty too!
I’ve decided to paint it row by row. Fruit by fruit.

January 2013 – preparing to teach color to watercolorists

I got an email from Jan Shively, a lovely woman in Montana who had seen my work in a Sacramento newspaper telling me if I ever taught weekend workshops, to let her know. She wanted to learn from me. Weekend workshops? Never done that before. So I asked the painters in my groups what they’d like to know, in the way of a special topic. “Color!” was the overwhelming response. Ok, so now I have to figure out what I know about color (hard to separate from my own knowledge and experience) and how to teach it in a way that is super practical, relatively easy and fun. This is the result of many evenings of play in this direction.

I really wanted to keep it out of the technical terminology and theory rhelm – hues, tints, shades, and what means what isn’t all that useful in day-to-day painting. But stuff like whether a pigment is lightfast and how it mixes with other colors is.
Here’s what my palette looked like after making a color mixing panel – Gosh, I love color!

December 2012 – Peonies in Vase – the vase is done

A week before Christmas, probably won’t paint much until afterwards. I’m so happy with how the vase looks. And a lot easier than I’d expected. Just paint what I see…

December 2012 – Peonies in Vase – starting on the vase

Spent an evening listening to 5 episodes of Downton Abbey and working on the vase. Nice to be back to this one.

November 2012 – Cindy’s Garden – Finished!

Two days before deadline! Whew!

November 2012 – Cindy’s Garden – working on her profile

Something was bugging me – it didn’t look like her. I confirmed this with Dave, her husband. Though she was out of focus in the background, it needed to look like her still. This is the before and after (on the left) of an evening of working on it, bit by bit. Who says you can’t re-do watercolor?